“Oh, Al,” sighed my uncle, “I don’t see what we’re coming to. What’s the use of you and me slaving here and she taking on so? Do you wonder, lad, that it’s hard for me to keep a pledge? It just drives me mad. Here we have to go on through the day, working ourselves to death, only to have the money go in that way! It’s torture, and always sets me off into drink, too!” When we arrived home on such nights, uncle would have stored up an afternoon of wrath, and, on entering the house, would unload it on aunt. She would work herself into an hysterical paroxysm, screaming, shrieking, pawing, and frothing at the mouth, so that uncle would suddenly leave her to me and go off for the night to a saloon. In the morning, when both were sober, would occur the real disheartening quarrel, when aunt would tell uncle he lied if he said she had been drunk; the words would get more and more heated until, in an unbearable fit of rage, insults would be exchanged and lead up to a struggle, a bloody struggle, that sometimes was on the threshold of murder. That day there would be no dinner for us at all, and I would have to run out to the gates and buy something like an apple-roll or a pie. At night we would find aunt sitting down, perfectly sober, but silent, and with no supper ready. “Get it yourself, you old fiend,” she would announce. Uncle would leave the house and get his meal in an eating-house, while aunt would make me a supper and scold me while I ate it, for she always considered me as one of her secret enemies, and linked my name with my uncle’s in almost every quarrel. But there were few quarrels of long standing between my foster parents. They were generally patched up with a drink or two. Then the wheel would turn again and produce exactly the same conditions as before. One day, uncle, in a noble-minded effort to get away from temptation, told us that he had decided to board in another place, where he could live in peace. But aunt visited all the boarding-houses that she knew, finally found her husband in one at the North End, and scolded him so unmercifully, and unloaded so much weight of family history, that he came back to the South End with her on the car, took a pail, and brought back a quart of beer, and things went on as before. After we had established our piano, and when uncle had become well acquainted with the spinners, he proposed to invite some of them with their wives for a “house-warming.” The event occurred on a Saturday night. “Fatty” Dunding came, and brought an unknown woman with him, whom he tickled under the chin in play quite often, and told her that she was a “stunner in that new piece of hair, even better looking than in t’other lighter shade!” Tom Fellows, a tall man with a poetic face, brought his wife and child, a baby of seven months. There was a bass-voiced spinner named Marvin present, and he brought a roll of music with him. “What hast’ got in, Stanny?” asked “Fatty.” “Summat to warm cockles o’ t’ ’eart?”